TORONTO—About the best thing to happen to the Maple Leafs in the past week and a half is that Will Arnett has worn Doug Gilmour and Wendel Clark t-shirts on back-to-back episodes of the NBC sitcom Up All Night.

What’s happening on the ice is no laughing matter.

After Saturday night’s 5-2 loss to the Ottawa Senators, the Maple Leafs have lost three of their past four games, and it was not even easy for Toronto to feel good about Thursday’s win in St. Louis, as a blown two-goal lead resulted in that game going to a shootout. Toronto was tied for the NHL’s best record on Nov. 3, and since then the Maple Leafs have been outscored 19-6.

Yes, Toronto still is in first place, even after Saturday’s flop, but more and more that feels like a placeholder designation until the defending Stanley Cup champion Bruins claim the Northeast Division’s top spot for themselves. Boston’s 6-2 win on Saturday night was its fifth in a row, a stretch that included the 7-0 thumping of Toronto that now looks like a turning point for both clubs.

The Leafs had a grand opportunity to get back on track against the Senators, who while not the historically bad team that some thought they might be at the start of the season, are not serious playoff contenders. That showed plainly with a passing display in the first period would have made Tim Tebow wince. Ottawa was charged with six official giveaways, compared to only four shots on goal in the opening frame, but Toronto went to the locker room up just 1-0 on Tyler Bozak’s first goal of the season.

“We didn’t have a killer instinct tonight,” Toronto coach Ron Wilson said. “We had a really good first period, and then we—again, like in St. Louis—we backed off a little bit, and they scored a goal, and then the inevitable things that are going to happen when you’re not digging in and pushing.”

Those would be the penalties that led to a 5-on-3 and Nick Foligno’s tiebreaking goal. Even down two men, the way that Foligno scored was inexcusable for Toronto, as Foligno came off the bench and skated right by Jake Gardiner to the middle of the ice, with defenseman Mike Komisarek paying no heed on the far side, either. Foligno took a quick pass from Erik Karlsson, skated unmolested to the slot and slapped a quick blast past Ben Scrivens.

“We’ve been playing 20 minutes some games, 30 minutes in others, and not playing at all the rest of the game,” Bozak said. “We’ve got to find a way to put a full 60 together.”

The 20 minutes the Leafs played on Saturday night were not all in the first period as might have been implied, because a big reason that they didn’t have a bigger advantage after the first period was a grisly first 10 minutes of the game in which both teams still seemed to be in awe of the Hall of Famers they saw during pregame ceremonies. It took a fight between Mike Brown and Zenon Konopka at the 10:36 mark—at which point the Leafs had a 3-0 edge in shots on goal—to spur at least one team to life.

Toronto did play well for several minutes in the third period, getting within 3-2 on Joffrey Lupul’s goal from behind the net after it appeared Craig Anderson had stymied a massive flurry of action. But Foligno and Milan Michalek scored empty-net goals to put the game away for Ottawa.

Michalek’s goal, a 159-footer that defenseman Carl Gunnarsson could not chase down, was the 58th allowed this season by the Maple Leafs, a figure surpassed in the league only by the Senators and Blue Jackets.

Toronto has certainly missed concussed goaltender James Reimer, who has been out since getting hurt on Oct. 22, but that goals-against total cannot simply be laid at the pads of Jonas Gustavsson and Saturday night’s losing netminder, Scrivens. Toronto’s penalty kill is an abysmal 47-for-65 on the season, and the losses have started to pile up not as much because the defense has gotten worse, but because Toronto’s shots have stopped finding the back of the net. Phil Kessel, the NHL’s leading scorer pretty much since the second game of the season, had an assist on Bozak’s goal Saturday, but has scored only twice himself in the last seven games.

“We started the way that we talked about wanting to start, and the way we want to play to be successful,” Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf said. “For some reason, we’ve been getting away from it.”

Phaneuf was talking about the game, but could have been dissecting the season. There is not some magic formula that will rescue the Leafs or get them back “killer instinct” that Wilson spoke of. They have not been a good defensive team all season, and now they are not as good an offensive team as they were at the start.

The result is bad hockey, three losses in four games and an impending sense that the only Leafs shirts you’ll see on NBC come spring are when Arnett and Christina Applegate are in reruns.